December 23, 2013

Let’s Build A Character For Anima (Part 1)

by Joshua Garrett

Let’s take a look at what it takes to build a character for my favorite role-playing game, Anima: Beyond Fantasy. Just as in my look at build a character for Pathfinder, this is just meant to act as an example, not as a guide for building your own character for the game. To do that, you will need your own copy of the Anima core rulebook. Also, unlike my look at building a Pathfindercharacter, I will be using some supplemental material, mostly from the Game Master’s Toolkit, Gaia: Beyond the Dreams, and Arcana Exxet: Secrets of the Supernatural. Also, my group tends to use a few house-rules for the game, most of them from Core Exxet, which has yet to see an English release, and I will attempt to note those as I go. So, with all that said, let’s begin.

As always, character ideas need to come first. In Anima, there are lots of options. To begin with, there are 20 character classes. After going over them all and thinking about what would be fun to build, I decided on building a Summoner, a character who is able to call upon, command, and banish supernatural creatures from beyond the veil of their world or what they refer to as “the Wake.” Then I start looking through the various options for what my character is. Although Anima does have other races, like in Pathfinder, these are not so much player options. What is an option though is playing as a Nephilim, one born with the soul of one of the lost. In game terms, this grants you a number of subtle special abilities while costing you a small amount of experience at the end of each session. In short, you do not level up quite as fast as non-Nephilim characters. I always find them interesting, however, so I settle on my character being a Ebudan Nephilim, a human being with the soul of a lost angel. Also, I have chosen from this character to be from the Dominion, but there will be more on that later.

Now I need to figure out the character’s attributes. In Anima, characters have eight attributes. These are agility, strength, dexterity, constitution, perception, intelligence, power, and willpower. My game group uses a point-buy system for the game, and so I will be using the standard 55 point build. In Anima, first-level attributes range from one to ten, with five being the average. For summoners, the most important attributes tend to be power and willpower, so right away I set those both to nine, costing 18 of my 55 points. I do not see physical strength coming into play much for the character, so I opt for only a four, slightly below average, but because I want to have a decent amount of health I give the character a constitution of seven, taking me to 29 out of 55. I would like the character to possess the Gift, the ability to use magic, in order to qualify for some advantages later on so I put nine into intelligence, putting me at 38. That leaves 17 points remaining to divide between agility, dexterity, and perception. As I could put six into two of them and five in the remaining, I do so with sixes in agility and perception and a five in dexterity. That makes my final attribute totals agility six, strength four, dexterity five, constitution seven, perception six, intelligence nine, power nine, and willpower nine. That is it, we have our attributes.

Thus far we have a Ebudan Nephilim summoner from the Dominion with the attributes listed above. A good start. Next time we will get into selecting the advantages and disadvantages our character will have and start looking at some of the derived values.

As always, thanks for reading, good gaming, and a Happy Holiday season to you all.